Co-founder and CEO Ritik Malhotra compared Streem to the external hard drives that he once used to transport large media files. Existing cloud services don’t quite work as a replacement, he said, because they usually store copies on your hard drive and they limit your overall storage — that can be problematic if, say, you’ve got lots of high-quality video files. (Dropbox, for example, offers 2 gigabytes for free and pro plans for storing 100, 200, or 500 gigabytes.)

With Streem, on the other hand, you pay $20 a month for unlimited storage. The company can afford to offer this, Malhotra said, through a combination of de-duplication and compression: “De-duplication is the biggest space saver.”

Although the files should act like any other files on your hard drive, they won’t take up any space. And Malhotra said the technology is optimized for media, for example adjusting the quality of a video stream based on the user’s bandwidth.

The company has created apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web.

As for the funding, it comes from YC, 500 Startups, Start Fund, IronFire Capital, Arbor Ventures, Grooveshark/Onswipe founder Andres Barreto, and various other angel investors.

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OverviewY Combinator is a startup accelerator based in Mountain View, CA.
In 2005, Y Combinator developed a new model of startup funding. Twice a year they invest a small amount of money ($120K) in a large number of startups (most recently 68). The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months. The YC partners work closely with each company to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch …